Various types of consumer appliances are designed with pull-out compartment drawers. For example, a number of popular refrigerator styles have freezer compartments with one or more pull-out drawers that span the width of the appliance and include storage baskets or bins. Examples of these refrigerators include the Profile™ French door and Armoire style refrigerators from General Electric Appliances. The conventional pull-out drawers typically include side brackets that are mounted to slides of a slide mechanism that, in turn, has a base member mounted to the compartment liner.
Due to their substantial width, depth, and weight, the pull-out drawers are susceptible to misalignment between the sides when moving the drawer into and out of the appliance compartment, particularly if the door is grasped off-center and the pulling/closing force is applied non-parallel to the slide structure. This misalignment may lead to binding or “racking” of the drawer, which may make further movement of the drawer difficult and may also lead to an improper seal of the drawer in the closed position.
A known approach to minimize racking of the drawers is to synchronize the sliding movement of the opposite slide mechanisms with a gear and cross shaft assembly. A gear is provided at each side of the drawer that engages with a stationary gear rail as the drawer moves in and out of the freezer compartment. The gears are connected with a cross shaft that spans the width of the drawer. The shaft synchronizes movement of the respective gears along the gear rail, which is imparted to the slide mechanisms. Thus, any off-center pulling/pushing force on the drawer handle is compensated for through the shaft and gears.
Although the shaft and gear assembly discussed above is beneficial in minimizing the occurrence of racking, location of the shaft is problematic in that it reduces the usable volume of the compartment for features such as bins, baskets, ice buckets, and so forth, especially when such devices are suspended above or below the drawer in a freezer compartment.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide an anti-racking system for pull-out drawers that includes the benefits of the shaft and gear assembly discussed above without sacrificing usable volume of the compartment.